Alliance Manchester Business School, U. of Manchester, United Kingdom
Since the global financial crisis, populism has become a more successful electoral strategy than during the Cold War or in the heyday of globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s. In particular, its success in developed, as well as developing, countries, has transformed populism from a political curiosity into an area of serious enquiry for economics and business scholars. The purpose of this professional development workshop (PDW) is to bring together scholars working on populism to develop papers on examples from history that can help to answer this question. As part of a planned special issue of Business History Review, we hope to examine just how firms have dealt with prior waves of populist governance in the past, looking to understand responses at the firm level across various vectors. While we understand that much of the historical context for such an examination may come from mainly developed countries (and, in particular, the rich literature and material from the United States), we encourage submissions that especially focus on a non-Western context, as in the Global South, which has been a potent breeding ground for populism for decades.
